The Episcopal Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Spanish Episcopal Conference has published a doctrinal note on the role of emotions in the act of faith, titled Cor ad cor loquitur —“The heart speaks to the heart”—. The document was authorized for publication by the Permanent Commission at its meeting on February 24 and 25 in Madrid, and had previously been approved by the bishop members of the Commission at their CCLXV meeting on February 20.
The note takes as its starting point the cardinal’s motto Cor ad cor loquitur, associated with Saint John Henry Newman —mentioned in the text as “recently declared a Doctor of the Church”— and uses it to frame its central thesis: spiritual life and the encounter with God affect the person “in the totality of their dimensions: affective, intellectual, and volitional.” From that premise, the bishops emphasize that faith involves “the whole of human existence” and that, alongside trust in God and the cognitive elements proper to the adhesion and confession of faith, emotions and feelings such as spiritual joy, love, or peace also appear.
The document is presented with an explicit pastoral motivation. According to the Commission, in recent years signs of a “rebirth of the Christian faith” have been observed, especially among young Spaniards of the so-called Generation Z, and the emergence of “first proclamation” initiatives that facilitate the encounter with Christ or the revitalization of faith is noted. The note states that the Church values the creativity of these methods but warns of a risk: that the Christian experience be reduced to an “emotivism” that turns people into consumers of impacts and seekers of spiritual complacency. In that context, it insists that the proclamation of Christ does not seek to provoke feelings as a direct end, but to witness an event capable of transforming existence.
In its cultural analysis, the text describes an “absolutization of affectivity” in postmodernity, with the shift from “I think, therefore I am” to “I feel, therefore I am,” and argues that this dynamic can fragment and disorient, also in the religious sphere. The note further points out that the subject centered on emotion is more manipulable and warns of possible forms of “emotional bombardment” in spiritual contexts, going so far as to mention “spiritual abuse” and group pressure to uniformize feelings, as well as the recourse to false mystical experiences to dominate consciences or facilitate other abuses.
At the same time, the Commission avoids an anti-emotional reading of Christian life and affirms that feelings play an important role and cannot be ignored. It draws on Scripture and the spiritual tradition to sustain that God also reaches man in his affective interiority, recalling biblical passages on the love of God and on the feelings of Christ in the Gospels. The key, it states, lies in integrating the emotional in harmony with reason and will, avoiding both sentimentalism and the reductionism that disconnects feelings from truth and goodness.
In the second part, the note offers theological-pastoral discernment criteria oriented toward new evangelization initiatives. Among them, it highlights the Trinitarian identity of faith, the personal dimension of the encounter with Christ without reducing it to ideas or norms, the need for doctrinal formation to ground experience in the objective truth of the kerygma, and the ecclesial dimension of the act of faith, emphasizing that the “I believe” is also “we believe” and that the diversity of charisms must serve unity. The text adds ethical and charitable criteria —faith translated into works and service— and celebrative criteria, warning against “effectistic” celebrations or Eucharistic worship outside of Mass that is decontextualized, and insisting on the centrality of the Sunday Eucharist and fidelity to liturgical norms.
The note concludes by exhorting to embrace faith in the totality of its dimensions and to recognize the legitimate place of emotions and feelings within a healthy affectivity, as a path to a transformative encounter with Christ “from heart to heart,” proposing the Virgin Mary as a model of the act of faith. It also includes the list of the bishop members of the Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith and specifies that the Permanent Commission authorized the publication at its CCLXXII meeting in February 2026.